Common Issues in Impact Sliding Glass Doors

Hi, my name is Lizette LaForge from Beacon Windows.

And today I wanted to take just a couple of minutes to talk to you about some things we’re noticing along the beachfront communities here with impact doors that are 4 to 7 years old. Impact doors are a lot lot heavier than typical standard sliding glass doors from yesteryear. And we’re starting to see some problems that are causing us some great concern.

We thought we’d make a quick video to show you how to look for these issues in your door. if you’re actually having a problem. So you’ll understand what to do about it, when that’s happening. Here’s an example of an impact door. Now this is a great test. Bring the door up almost to the lock but leave a little bit of a crack. And then watch what happens as you see my finger. We’re going to take this finger, we’re going to move it on up. And you’re going to see that the crack is getting wider as we get at the top. See how that’s going, all the way to the top, much, much, much wider. And we also notice as we get to the top that the weather stripping has gotten beat up pretty badly in the door system.

So when we see a crack that’s crooked like that, what that indicated to us is that this panel that we have in the door system has, in this case, has moved backwards a little bit. It’s tighter at the bottom than it is at the top, ok. And that’s definitely telling me that I’m having a system issue with the wheels. Now when wheels get out of whack, they cause a number of problems. Some of the problems start with the locking mechanism. So a really good indicator, or symptom if you will, could be actually a problem with your lock. And I’m going to show you, first I’m going to try to open this door which is a little bit challenging.

And I’m going to open it just a little bit. But I want to show you something in the locking system. And sometimes you’ll see these get damaged rather badly. Because what will happen is this heavy door which weighs about 300 pounds is smashing into, either pushing upward, like In this case you’ll see the damage is on the bottom. And that makes sense because this door is crooked that direction. If this damage was, if the door was crooked in this direction, you’d see this being broken, ok. But this particular keeper type situation is also, you can see on this side of the door. Let’s push the door open a little bit further and you will see that this particular keeper and this particular locking mechanism are really having some challenges.

You know this one is very very loose from the inside. We see it all broken. And this is very commonly happening because the door gets crooked and it breaks the lock by accident, because of the weight of the door. So another issue that we see a lot of and I want to bring your attention down toward to the track area. So as we come on down here, you’re going to see this, a little bit of damage in the track. Track’s not real bad in this case. But what we’re seeing is a serious amount of rubbing right in here. This is supposed to be smooth just like it is over in here. But we start to see, right in this area here, that it’s to get very very abraded. And over here I can actually feel this is quite rough, with my fingers. So this is telling me that this heavy heavy door is out of whack somehow.

It’s crooked, it’s pushed backwards and somehow this edge in this particular area is getting mashed on by the heavy door system. Which is what is causing this problem in the first place. So when we take a look at a door system, we have to look at the whole thing and really basically unify it. We’re going to take this one apart. We’re going to put in stainless steel rollers. We’re going to put in stainless steel locking mechanism to fix the lock system. We’re going to try to address what’s going on with that rubbing. So that we make the whole entire door healthy again and much easier to open.

Now it’s still a 300 pound door,so it’s going to be still rather weighty. But if you put good quality rollers in with stainless steel and sealed bearings, you get a lot longer life and a lot easier use, you know. One of the things we wanted to mention is when you have an older door system, they weigh maybe 80-85 pounds. These newer doors that weigh so much more. When a problem starts to happen, these more aggravated issues come up.

And I use the example, it’s kind of like, if you’re dancing with someone and they’re an elephant and they step on your foot. You’re going to the hospital, ok. So you want to avoid this type of an issue happening in your door system as much as you can. So look for the crookedness in the door. Look for damaged lock issue. And look down in your track and see if you’ve got something going on in there. If you have any of those three things, try to figure out what’s going on or call a professional. And we’ll come in and fix it for you.

So we fixed this door. Let’s take a look at what we’ve done in this door. You’ll notice it’s much, much, much smoother. It’s real easy to work. You hear a little bit of the wheels as they’re working their way, as they’re starting to get used. That noise will dissipate in time. You also hear a little bit of whooshing sound because we replaced all the weather stripping all the way around the door.

So that whooshing is when the weather stripping’s gliding past some things and that’s a normal sound. Keep in mind weather stripping is designed to keep air intrusion and water intrusion out or in. Depending on which direction you want to have good quality weather stripping. We also replaced the lock. And funny enough, when we took this door system apart we noticed there were 4 other locks down at the bottom that had broken and fallen in. So what that’s telling us, remember locks are indicators. when you have a problem with a lock system like that and that’s repetitive.

It’s telling you there’s something going on with this door. The broken crookedness of it is causing the locks to break. And that’s why their having repetitive issues with it. Now let’s take a look at what we did down here in the track. Push that door out of the way and we’ll bring you down here to look at this track area. We have put what is called the stainless steel track over it. This is a special kind of track that’s going to give a lot of life to this door . It basically gives a new surface for the rollers to work on. Brand spanking new. And we also were able to make the adjustments here so we don’t hear this scrapping noise that was causing the damage on this sidewall here. And then I’m going to go ahead and close the door back up so we can kind of get a feel for how this door looks now, what it’s supposed to look like.

You notice as we go all the way up, it’s nice and smooth and even. We’ve got some nice weather stripping going on there. This is the way your door is supposed to look when it’s correct. Should be even all the way from top to bottom. And it should open very, very, very smoothly, ok. So what we do, we specialize as a company in fixing impact doors like this. Understanding how they work in harmony as a single system.

In addition to that we work with older doors as well. We specialize in corrosion issues. We replace things with stainless steel wherever possible. We work with the higher quality products because what we’re looking to do is give you longevity in your door systems.

If you have any questions: Please feel free to GIVE US A CALL You can reach us through

www.SliderRepair.com

Or you can reach me on my personal cell, at 727-641-8106.

We’re more than happy to help you. We’ll really try hard to do a great job for you. Thanks.